I’ve been having difficulty installing Mandriva from the cover Cdroms. At present it all seems to install correctly, boots up, go to the OS select screen, choose linux, I then see about four lines of code (Linux starting I guess) on screen and the system then reboots.
After reboot I get the choose OS screen, choose Linux, see four lines of code on screen and the system reboots… endless reboot loop!
I can select “e” and end up in grub which doesn’t help.

All seems OK if I boot into Windows. The PC is a AMD K6, 64Mb RAM, 8Gb HD (4Gb win, 128Mb Linux swap rest is Linux). No USB.
The install always goes to the DOSesq screens rather than the neat hi res style. I’ve run SuSE 7 and other distros on the same PC in the past (different HD).

Could it be anything to do in the way the HD is set up? What about BIOS?

The k6 processor won't boot with the default kernel which is compiled for i686. You need to get the i586 flavour kernel installed instead. I had the same problem with Mandrake 10.1. The kernel package will be called something like kernel-i586-up-1GB-<version>. You will need to boot a rescue system ( the install disc ? ), mount your installed hard disk partition(s) read-write, chroot to the root partition on hard disk, and install the correct kernel. Not easy to do unless you understand everything I just said. Good luck